Hello, friends! I hope that everyone had a great Monday! Last week was our first full week of
the Daily Five and overall it went really well. Of course we have a few things we need to work on but I know we will be pros before too long!
I changed up my rotation board and some of the things my students will be doing during the Daily Five a bit this year. I purchased my new rotation cards from Jessica, aka The TeacherTalk. I loved all the different
options; you can find them in here store {here}.
This year I added a vocabulary station, a journaling
station, and a task card station.
So I guess you could say that my Daily Five block has more of a
workstation vibe this year.
This reason for adding the additional stations was because I wanted to provide my
students with additional exposures to our vocabulary words/skills and I also
wanted to give them additional opportunities to work on some of the anchor
standards and skills that are often on our end of the unit/year assessments. Including these two stations has made a
difference already.
Responding to reading is huge part of
our PBA PARCC assessments, so I wanted to make sure we all got a head start when it came to responding to our reading. I just started introducing responding to reading to some of my groups and I'll share more of what my students do later in the year.
Last week our task card station had my students reviewing
main idea. Most groups used
{these} task cards, which you will see below, and my below level/IEP students used {these} task
cards.
Since I have a large number of IEP students this year, I
knew additional exposures to our vocabulary words would help them better
understand our anchor text and allow them to be more successful on our biweekly
comprehension tests. This week our vocabulary station had my students reviewing
the meanings of our Treasures vocabulary words for The Raft. My students played vocabulary memory,
vocabulary dominoes, filled out a crossword and then wrote sentences with our
vocabulary words. I somehow forgot to take pictures of this station but I think you get the gist of how our vocabulary station works/functions.
As the year progresses, my students will do more with
Greek/Latin roots and figurative language for their vocabulary station work but this certainly works for
now!
My students always love our word work workstations, which I use for my spelling stations. I use parts of Amanda’s Words Galore
pack and other materials that I’ve collected throughout the years. Their favorites this year are sign
language, sandpaper words and magnet words.
During our reading rotations I focused on
characterization and informational text structure with my students. I got lucky last week because the main selection from our basal,The Raft, is a great book to use for
characterization because the main character, Nicky, makes such a drastic change
from the beginning to end of the book.
On Monday, I modeled how to use a character’s actions,
thoughts/feelings and words when choosing his/her character traits. I used the following anchor chart, no
judging, and passage for this mini lesson.
In small groups, we examined Nicky’s thoughts/feelings,
words and actions from the first half of the book carefully in our small groups
to choose character traits that best described him the first time we met. I sadly don't have a picture of this activity but I did use of the character graphic organizers from this pack.
We finished the book as a whole class later in the week and
discussed how Nicky’s character changed during the story.
I noticed while meeting with my small groups, many of my
students wanted to use words like “not nice” or “mad” to describe Nicky. Which was true BUT weren’t the
best words to describe him. We
used several of Rachel’s characterization task cards as a whole class to
practice choosing good fit character traits throughout the week. I had my students work with their
shoulder partner to choose character traits to describe the characters in the
passages I showed on the Smartboard. With lots of practice, they got much better as the
week went on.
The students that needed a little bit more practice with
choosing good character traits worked with me later in the week. I used these task cards from Teaching
With a Mountain View! I love that these cards are good context clue practice as
well!
If you use Treasures, you know the third text of the week is
always nonfiction. I’ve been
trying to use these more and more, especially to help teach different text
structures. In our second round of
small groups this week, we read a passage called Into the Swamp. We identified its text structure,
completed a graphic organizer, and also learned how maps can be helpful text
features.
We also reviewed the types of sentences this past week
because I had noticed that so many of my students needed review with ending
punctuation. We started by
watching the following Brainpop Junior video, which was fantastic!
We also took notes on the four main sentence types with the flip
book from my Types of Sentences Activity pack.
Later in the week, we also did the types of sentences graffiti wall activity from my Types of Sentences pack as well. I had a meeting before school that day, so I wasn't able to to prep the actual templates from my pack like I would have liked to because I teach writing/grammar first thing in the morning. However, they still really LOVED the modified version. :)
Well I think that recaps our week! :) We were certainly busy but we sure did have fun and learned a lot too!